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In my English class we’re working on a blogging project. Each student chooses a topic that she is interested in and we blog once a week for six weeks about the topic.
I chose to write about how overediting photos and advertisements in the media effects the self-image of girls. I am sharing this with you because it is an issue that is largely talked about not only in beauty but also in fashion, where extremely skinny models dominate the runways.
Here is a copy of my first post:
Image source: http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2010/08/ann_taylor.html (Ann Taylor advertisement)
Advertisements are an unavoidable part of our everyday lives. They are on TV’s from inside our homes to inside our taxis. We see them on bilboards plastered up against high-rise buildings, on our computer screens as we scroll through facebook and in our very own hands as we flip through magazines.
They are annoying, but advertisements can’t actually harm us, can they? Actually, they can.
Many girls want to look like their favorite actress on the cover of a magazine, but the reality is that even the actress on the cover doesn’t really look like that. Images that we see in the media are almost always photoshopped. This has distorted our modern perception of beauty.
Teen people magazine has discovered that 27% of girls feel the pressure from the media to have a perfect body. A poll in 1996 by an advertising company proved that advertisements make women fear becoming “old” or “unattractive.” Psychology of Women Quarterly has said that frequent association with the media is connected to having a stronger belief in the importance of appearance.
How do you tell a girl who is starving herself that it is actually impossible to look like the woman she sees hundreds of times a day in the media? How do you expose the images that are being photoshopped and demonstrate true, authentic beauty?
This video link suggests that there be a warning label on all photoshopped images: The Photoshop Effect
